Karen: This is PKF Texas, the Entrepreneur’s Playbook, and I’m Karen Love, Director of Practice Growth. Today I’m here with Frank Landreneau, one of Houston’s go-to international tax advisors. Welcome to the Playbook, Frank.
Frank: Well, thank you, Karen. It’s good to be here.
Karen: Fantastic. Well, let’s get started with sharing a little bit of information about – I think that I’ve heard that the international tax compliance environment has changed over the last few years and I was wondering if you could provide me a little more background on that.
Frank: Absolutely. Around the time of 2008, the IRS started taking a closer look at tax payers that have either foreign assets or foreign operations. And many of these tax payers found themselves not quite prepared for that level of scrutiny.
Karen: Wow, okay. So the preparation for the scrutiny, how does that affect people that you’re working with on a daily basis?
Frank: Well, what we found was that in examining a lot of the taxpayer’s filings, we found that clients who’d been served by previous advisors had not necessarily complied with all the file requirements. One such example is in the case of, let’s say, a client that has a foreign corporation which has a foreign bank account. The thought process was that the U.S. owner had no filing obligation for that foreign bank account owned by that foreign corporation and that’s simply not the case.
Karen: Wow. Well, that’s way confusing to me, but I’m so glad that you’re a guru on that and our go-to person. We’re really lucky to have you here at PKF Texas with that and I’m wondering if you’ll come back and talk to us a little bit more about that.
Frank: I would love to. I have lots of things more to share.
Karen: Fantastic. That’s good for us. Well, for more information about our international capabilities, visit www.pkftexas.com/internationaldesk. This has been a Thought Leader production brought to you by the PKF Texas Entrepreneur’s Playbook. So tune in next week for another chapter.